Choice of aspect ratio for games *spawn

I still use a CRT monitor so I wasn't aware there was 24hz support in modern TVs. The projector isn't required then.

Related question: Do you guys prefer 16:9 over 4:3?

Yes, and easily. 16:9 images are better suited than 4:3 for the human vision, it works for me anyway.
 
Actually, the human field of vision has a 4:3 aspect ratio:

BINOCULAR VISUAL FIELDS WITH HEAD AND EYES FIXED
image026.jpg

http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/personnel/al/papers/64vision/17.htm

As you guys prove, it's perfectly possible for people to prefer a visual aspect that is objectively inferior to another. In this case, 16:9 (which wastes the vertical FOV) over 4:3.
 
Yes 4:3 is good if you want to discern colorless forms.

But if you want to play videogames with colors, then a 16:9 image is better:

image024.jpg


That's the right eye, add the left and you got roughly a 16:9 visual field with colors.
 
16 10 is much better for me because it feels more "Vast" and the hud feel not as disctracting (but maybe this is just my personal preference).

@video
arno sticks out like sore thumb.. just like in AC 3 and 4.
 
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Yes 4:3 is good if you want to discern colorless forms.

But if you want to play videogames with colors, then a 16:9 image is better:

http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/personnel/al/papers/64vision/17_files/image024.jpg

That's the right eye, add the left and you got roughly a 16:9 visual field with colors.
Except that the visual fields of both eyes have a huge overlap, hence you get 4:3.

16 10 is much better for me because it feels more "Vast" and the hud feel not as disctracting (but maybe this is just my personal preference).
You're simply used to the way movies have looked for the past 60 years. /s
 
Visual field preference is really a discussion for another thread. I'll just throw in that it's more psychological to prefer widescreen. The sky and the ground at your feet are generally irrelevant to understanding a situation - there's a reason why Hollywood chose the aspect ratios they did, and it was to get meaningful content onto their expensive film instead of filling the screen with clouds and road/grass.

Suffice to say, nothing particularly wrong with preferring any aspect. Ultimately it depends on the game. Top down games running in all directions would best fit a square or circular aspect!
 
some developers also insist with their chosen AR. i think it was FFXIII and Evil Within. AC also keep insisting to be displayed as 16:9 :(
 
some developers also insist with their chosen AR. i think it was FFXIII and Evil Within. AC also keep insisting to be displayed as 16:9 :(
RE4 as well. The Order too.

Visual field preference is really a discussion for another thread. I'll just throw in that it's more psychological to prefer widescreen. The sky and the ground at your feet are generally irrelevant to understanding a situation - there's a reason why Hollywood chose the aspect ratios they did, and it was to get meaningful content onto their expensive film instead of filling the screen with clouds and road/grass.

Suffice to say, nothing particularly wrong with preferring any aspect. Ultimately it depends on the game. Top down games running in all directions would best fit a square or circular aspect!
If you could split the framerate/aspect ratio topic into another thread to keep the discussion that would be great.

Cinema in its inception had an aspect ratio of 1:33 (3.99:3). When audio was added to film the aspect ratio changed to 1:37 (4.11:3). Wide aspect ratios came into the picture in the 50's as a marketing gimmick to combat the rising popularity of TV (which was 4:3 also) It wasn't cheaper, required more film and more advanced cameras. 16:9 as a TV standard was adopted later as a compromise between 4:3 and the wider cinema ratios so that the content displayed would have the same amount of black bars around it.

As for the psychological reasons you give, they explain why people wouldn't care about the missing vertical information but not why they would prefer it. Good photography is not exclusive to wide aspect ratios.

30fps are preferable also for psychological reasons. At 30fps the content suggests I see a human in a realistic environment. At 60fps, thanks to all the extra information, it's obvious that it's a fake human in a fake environment that tries but fails to look realistic. Suspension of disbelief is lost.
 
Cinema in its inception had an aspect ratio of 1:33 (3.99:3).
Based on science, not art. It better matched human vision, but failed to recognise the impact of frame aspect on the art of film creation. Heck, back then creating artworks and stories with film wasn't even a notion.
It wasn't cheaper, required more film and more advanced cameras.
Not sure about that. Anamorphic just needed different lenses on the cameras and projectors. But for the same horizontal FOV, if you wanted to maintain image quality and add vertical FOV, you'd need to add film above and below.

As for the psychological reasons you give, they explain why people wouldn't care about the missing vertical information but not why they would prefer it. Good photography is not exclusive to wide aspect ratios.
Imagine a big battle scene like LOTR. You have a wide conflict stretching across the horizon. What's the value in a big empty sky above them? It just dilutes the impact of the visuals. You want a sense that the battle is all encompassing, not that there's a peaceful wider world ignoring it all (except for those particular shots for artistic effect).

Widescreen allows directors/cameramen to crop the shots to keep all the relevant information tight inside the human frame of reference and exclude the background 'noise'. Of course, it's not ideal for every scenario. It's certainly possible some film ideas would be better on a portrait canvas, if you wanted to focus on an individual in their entirety isolated from the context of their environment (something I've considered with a mobile-only movie concept). But 99 times out of a hundred, we're more interested in the space from our feet to our heads. Anything outside of that would just be a distraction. The final, loving gaze across the screen, separated by the full width of the frame, which shows just the two faces, would lose a lot of its gravitas if you'd add to that irrelevant arms, a lot of grass, and a big blue sky behind them.

In games, if the experience is still in the human frame of reference (head height, mostly horizontal movement and little vertical range for points of interest) then widescreen works well. If you add verticality to the gameplay, of the gameplay doesn't even use a human first-person-type reference, it may not. Where it's a natural fit for a football game, it's a pointless cropping in something like Diablo 3 where the vertical is just as important as the horizontal. As our displays have to double as TV and movie displays though, we're going to have to work with those preferred aspects in our games.

30fps are preferable also for psychological reasons. At 30fps the content suggests I see a human in a realistic environment. At 60fps, thanks to all the extra information, it's obvious that it's a fake human in a fake environment that tries but fails to look realistic. Suspension of disbelief is lost.
There's a whole other thread for that debate! ;)
 
Actually, the human field of vision has a 4:3 aspect ratio:

BINOCULAR VISUAL FIELDS WITH HEAD AND EYES FIXED
image026.jpg

http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/personnel/al/papers/64vision/17.htm

As you guys prove, it's perfectly possible for people to prefer a visual aspect that is objectively inferior to another. In this case, 16:9 (which wastes the vertical FOV) over 4:3.
I kinda prefer 4:3 myself, and I was thinking time ago about creating a thread in the forum with that question, if we will ever go back to 4:3.

4:3 just feels a lot more centered, more enveloping and focused.

I remember watching a video of an arcade machine from the early 90s which used two -sometimes three- 4:3 displays to show a panoramic view. :smile2: -wit can get you far-
 
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There's a whole other thread for that debate! ;)
No, the whole point of the aspect ratio question was to show how preference isn't dependent on objective qualities. 60fps aren't necessaily preferable because they convey more information or because they're smoother than 30fps.

The change to wider aspect ratios had nothing to do with artistry. It was all about creating products that couldn't be replicated on TV, forcing the people to go to movie theaters to get that experience. We have been stuck with an objectively inferior format for decades purely due to corporate greed. Large scale battles or vistas have no disadvantage on 4:3 formats if you frame them properly. That does require artistry. But even then, plenty of people as you've shown like this format, regardless of its shortcomings for purely aesthetical reasons.

Same thing applies to framerate. It doesn't matter if it's objectively superior in some scale, that has no bearing on personal perception or preference.

I kinda prefer 4:3 myself, and I was thinking time ago about creating a thread in the forum with that question, if we will ever go back to 4:3.

4:3 just feels a lot more centered, more enveloping and focused.

I remember watching a video of an arcade machine from the early 90s who used two -sometimes three- 4:3 displays to show a panoramic view. :smile2: -wit can get you far-

One of the reasons I still rock a CRT monitor :cool:
 
The change to wider aspect ratios had nothing to do with artistry. It was all about creating products that couldn't be replicated on TV, forcing the people to go to movie theaters to get that experience. We have been stuck with an objectively inferior...
If your objective is to fill the field of vision, it can be argued as objectively inferior. If your objective is to tell a moving story, it isn't. Especially when your dealing with displays that occupy a small fraction of the total FOV - at that point it really doesn't matter what the eye's performance is because the screens are operating well under the limits anyhow!

Large scale battles or vistas have no disadvantage on 4:3 formats if you frame them properly.
How? How do you frame this scene in 4:3 without lots of pointless rock above and below?

One of the reasons I still rock a CRT monitor :cool:
There's nothing stopping people viewing 4:3 content on their 16:9 displays. We do it all the time watching older SD content. You'd think more artists would go back to using 4:3 if it's artistically superior...
 
If your objective is to fill the field of vision, it can be argued as objectively inferior. If your objective is to tell a moving story, it isn't. Especially when your dealing with displays that occupy a small fraction of the total FOV - at that point it really doesn't matter what the eye's performance is because the screens are operating well under the limits anyhow!
Yes, just like framerate. If the objective is to display content smoothly then 60fps are definitely superior to 30fps. If the idea is to create a believable experience then 60fps can be a disadvantage because the extra information can break the illusion.

How? How do you frame this scene in 4:3 without lots of pointless rock above and below?
What exactly would be worse by filming that in 4:3? You might not like it as much but that is not an objective measurement, just personal preference.

There's nothing stopping people viewing 4:3 content on their 16:9 displays. We do it all the time watching older SD content. You'd think more artists would go back to using 4:3 if it's artistically superior...
Because most people hate letterboxing. They feel it's a waste of screen state and they're right. It's why full screen VHS tapes were so popular back in the day.
 
Because most people hate letterboxing. They feel it's a waste of screen state and they're right. It's why full screen VHS tapes were so popular back in the day.

I don't remember these at all. All of the VHS tapes I owned of movies were letter boxed, I don't recall cropped versions even existing.
 
In the early days of VHS everything was pan & scan!

Almost every VHS tape I had was pan & scan, even the collectors editions of some of the Star Trek movies.

The trouble with letterboxed tapes was that the resolution was awful as they weren't anamorphic. So towards the end when widescreen CRTs were coming in people would buy their letterboxed VHS tapes, zoom to get fullscreen, and then .... oh my. Dat nasty. And dat pause judder.
 
There's one thing that's being overlooked: horizontal visual scanning of a scene is common. The eyes move easily to left and right. Rarely is a scene scanned vertically.

For small displays of old, 4:3 made sense since there wasn't much of a display to scan. As displays grew in size, screen area was added to the left and right to exploit people's visual habit of left and right scanning.
 
Because most people hate letterboxing. They feel it's a waste of screen state and they're right. It's why full screen VHS tapes were so popular back in the day.

Maybe, but I remember the efforts of broadcasters to educate the public concerning letterboxing in the days before HD. The problem was that many viewers believed that the dark areas at the top and bottom of the screen were hiding part of the picture and would call the station to report what they thought was problem with the signal.

They didn't realize that there was nothing there to show.

Personally, I prefer seeing the whole picture as it was captured by the camera. Pan and scan really annoys me.
 
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